June 6, 2019

Researchers have
found an unexpected behavior in a Windows feature designed to protect remote
sessions that could allow attackers to take control of them.

The issue,
discovered by Joe Tammariello at the CERT Coordination Center (CERT) at
Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, is documented as
CVE-2019-9510. It stems from Network Level Authentication (NLA), which is a
feature that you can use to protect Windows installations that have the Remote
Desktop Protocol (RDP) enabled. NLA stops anyone from remotely logging into the
Windows computer by requiring them to authenticate first.

Starting with
Windows 10 release 1803 in April 2019, and with Windows Server 2019, Microsoft
changed the way NLA works. Now, the authentication mechanism caches the client’s
login credentials on the RDP host so that it can quickly log the client in
again if it loses connectivity. The change enables an attacker to circumvent a
Windows lock screen, warns CERT/CC, which disclosed the issue, in an advisory.

Let’s say you
remotely log in to a Windows box using RDP. Then, you lock that remote desktop
to stop an attacker from accessing it from your machine while you leave the
room.

The attacker
could interrupt the network connection between the local machine and the remote
Windows box and then reestablish it, by unplugging the network cable and
plugging it in again (or disabling and re-enabling Wi-Fi).

In yet another
step to scrape pedophiles off the bottom of its shoe, YouTube announced
on Monday that it’s banning youngsters from live-streaming without adult
supervision and that it’s limiting recommendations of videos that depict
“minors in risky situations.”

At the same time,
YouTube also implemented a classifier – a machine learning tool that helps to
identify specific types of content – that it says helped it remove a
significant number of violative comments.

It didn’t catch
them all. On Monday, the New
York Times published a writeup of research showing that YouTube’s automated
recommendation system (which suggests what to watch next and which drives most
of YouTube’s billions of views) was, months after the move to disable comments
on kids’ videos, suggesting videos of partially clothed kids (think two-piece
swimsuits) to users who watched “other videos of prepubescent, partially
clothed children.”

Three researchers
at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society – Jonas Kaiser,
Yasodara Córdova and Adrian Rauchfleisch – stumbled onto the videos while
looking into YouTube’s impact in Brazil, the Times reports.

A gang in New
York allegedly spent the past seven years using the ripped-off identities of
cellphone subscribers to steal $19 million worth of iPhones, according to a
now-unsealed complaint originally filed by federal prosecutors
at the end of April 2019.

The six
defendants have been charged with felony counts of mail fraud, conspiracy, and
aggravated identity theft.

New York City
Police Department (NYPD) detective Armando Coutinh, from the NYPD-FBI Joint
Major Theft Task Force, said in the complaint that the ring of alleged
fraudsters kept it up from at least 2012 to the present, selling new devices –
mostly iPhones – through fencing operations.

A simple plan

Here’s how it
worked, Coutinh explained: the fraud ring members would break into the accounts
of existing cellphone subscribers and add their names as “authorized users.”
Later on, they used stolen personally identifying information (PII) instead of
their own names to cook up new, fraudulent accounts.

Then, they’d
“upgrade” their phones, paying only a pittance, or nothing at all, in-store and
putting the rest of the purchase price on pay-by-month plans on the identity
theft victims’ dime.

The victims
included both the service providers, which typically picked up the cost of the
stolen phones, and the customers whose identities were stolen and/or whose
accounts were broken into. The complaint didn’t specify which providers were
targeted, nor how many people were defrauded.

Using the stolen
PII, the fraudsters created fake ID cards and fraudulent credit and debit
cards. Using those cards, they’d pose as legitimate subscribers and fan out
across the country to waltz into phone stores for their “upgrades.”

ACS

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